Person X honestly believes that intelligence tests are meaningless, and everyone can acheive anything , yet he will see no problem in using low test scores of a political opponent as a form of mockery, since clearly they really are stupid.
He may consider the preferences of parents who think group Y on average would have an undesirable effect on the values or academic achievement of their child and wish to make sure they have minimal influence on them to be so utterly immoral that must be proactively fought in personal and public life. But in practice he will never send his children to a school where group Y is a high percentage of the pupils. You see that is because naturally, the school is a bad school and no self respecting parent sends their child to a bad school.
These sound to me like good reasons for not associating with B. Selective rationality makes it likely he will do bad things for bad reasons and be sincerely unaware that he is doing bad things. He can probably rationalize embezzling my money as glibly as he can rationalize avoiding a “bad school”, whereas if he is person A, and knows perfectly well he does not want his children to associate with group X, he would know if he was cheating you.
Rationalization predicts bad behavior. Avoiding the inquisition does not predict bad behavior.
Selective rationality makes it likely he will do bad things for bad reasons and be sincerely unaware that he is doing bad things. He can probably rationalize embezzling my money as glibly as he can rationalize avoiding a “bad school”...
But that's not what I observe in reality. As Konkvistador said, common problems generate commonly accepted solutions. A strong discrepancy between respectable beliefs and reality leads to a common problem, and a specific mode of rationalization then becomes a commonly accepted and socially approved solution. And in my exp...
This is thread where I'm trying to figure out a few things about signalling on LessWrong and need some information, so please immediately after reading about the two individuals please answer the poll. The two individuals:
A. Sees that an interpretation of reality shared by others is not correct, but tries to pretend otherwise for personal gain and/or safety.
B. Fails to see that an interpretation of reality is shared by others is flawed. He is therefore perfectly honest in sharing the interpretation of reality with others. The reward regime for outward behaviour is the same as with A.
To add a trivial inconvenience that matches the inconvenience of answering the poll before reading on, comments on what I think the two individuals signal,what the trade off is and what I speculate the results might be here versus the general population, is behind this link.